Just wanted to get some feedback from anyone who has used the service (plot.ly) before w/ arduino. I've been using it now for about two weeks and I find it horribly buggy. Does anyone have tips/tricks or some best practices they've used when interfacing?

One example of some trouble I've had are my charts mysteriously going "missing". For instance, a few nights back, I restarted my arduino (which clears and writes over past data, i realize that), and began logging data at about 11pm EST. I woke up, and all was great, I could view my stream and nothing looked out of place. By 2pm that day, my visuals had disappeared, when I navigated to the link or logged into my account the data was gone. I inspected the json, and found three data points being recorded despite a few hours prior having seen a whole nights worth of data points (5min apart).

Another time, the same thing happened, but the graph only showed up when viewing from my mobile phone, and would not populate from my desktop.

I contacted the guys at plot.ly and got a lackluster response. I felt that because I am not a paying customer I obviously didnt know anything. Twice, they gave me the answer that my arduino was resetting, causing the graph to erase. When I responded, with screenshots of the issue, they didn't respond. When I followed up on my email, they again told me the arduino must be resetting. I literally sent screenshots of the plot not loading on my desktop, but being 100% there on my mobile. Their website directly states that should never happen.

I am fairly certain my Arduino is not resetting, because I am logging via an SD shield the date and times that the setup() function runs. By the off chance that the arduino had a bug, and it did reset without logging the data and skipping over the blocks of code that do the logging, I suppose that could be the issue?

Despite the issues of what I felt was a personal disconnect (and lack of care/respect for someone legitimately trying to help them find a problem with their service), I still find the interface a bit glitchy.

Take for instance a current snapshot of my plot:

I tried editing it, and mistakenly added a subplot. After trying to undo the issue - my graph is stuck in some weird limbo, and can't be undone no matter how I try.

I'm a beginner to arduino, having used it now for about two months, but I do have common sense and am a fast learner. I definitely feel that there are issues with plot.ly that aren't being addressed.

The latest patch of the library exposes an option with the real-time streaming API that will append new data to existing data when the Arduino resets. The commit in our open-source library here: https://github.com/plotly/arduino-api/commit/af0b791aa74822fc262725c87e48998cbf73d8afThe documentation for this option is here: https://github.com/plotly/arduino-api#overwriting-or-appending-dataThe examples have been updated, you'll want to change "overwrite" to "extend" on this line: https://github.com/plotly/arduino-api/blob/master/examples/ethernet/simple_ethernet.ino#L41

Thanks for the response. I haven't gotten around to actually getting the new patch up and running. I've had some hard time implementing it, even though it should be as simple as swapping out two files, it seems like I cant connect to the server again once it initializes.

I'm still working on it, but I do want to stress again, and maybe the best thing to do is revert to my old program, publish it along with my schematic and log printout for you to inspect. I can guarantee you void setup(){} ran only one time.

I haven't had much time to work through the issue, but I'll be focusing on it more in the next few coming days.

Any idea on what's causing the visual glitch? The other thing I notice occurring frequently is data points will become connected by a straight line even though they didn't occur in series. My visual in this post actually shows an example of it occurring (dark purple, yellow, light purple traces).